bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1990), p. 16
In the excerpts below, the corporate problems of External Affairs and International Trade are attributed to internal and external factors. But there are signs of hope.
New Breath of Life needed in External
There was a time, not so long ago, when joining the Department of External Affairs was the pinnacle of public service. Canada boasted a corps of diplomats – polished, scholarly, cosmopolitan — who represented the best of their generation…
The renaissance men disappeared as Canada’s influence ebbed in the 1960s. Pierre Trudeau might not have had any use for the professionals — he said he could get the same information from a newspaper-but External Affairs was already in decline.
In fact, today the standing of “the Department” in Ottawa has never been lower. Once a hotbed of creativity, it is now conservative and cumbersome. If Canada was slow to respond to the changes in Eastern Europe, to recognize the Palestine Liberation Front, the department is part of the reason…
A recent discussion paper by a junior officer describes a department in disarray. The paper was written for the staff association and does not necessarily represent its views. But it is seen as a reflection of the problems. The paper laments the difficulty of career advancement, poor salaries, inadequate job appraisal and working conditions, poor treatment of spouses, and too many layers of management. It blames the government for letting things run down. “By nickel and diming the foreign service into near penury — for all the wrong reasons — those responsible have created a near wasteland.”
The paper describes a proud department slipping into irrelevance because it is operating with a structure designed in the 1950s. Ultimately, this paralysis produces a foreign policy without direction or imagination, something a middle power with only modest influence in the world can ill-afford
Amid the malaise, there are signs of hope. Joe Clark, the minister since 1984, allows that the troops know more about morale than he does. He is willing to listen. Last December, the department struck a panel of senior officials to examine the organization.
What is encouraging about the exercise is that it has involved many of the 8,800 employees, half of whom are locally engaged staff abroad. Long accused of being rigid and unresponsive, senior managers are now listening as much to office secretaries as first secretaries. A suggestion box has attracted hundreds of proposals, from ending needless photocopying to firing deputy ministers.
At root, the review is trying to determine the best role for the department in the 1990s in light of the demands of economic globalization, the outbreak of peace and the revival of international organization. It is examining, for example, whether all foreign missions should fulfill the traditional role of political reporting, as well as providing trade, aid and consular services. It costs as much as $250,000 to keep an officer abroad; the department wants to know if it can do more with less.
While the review will go to cabinet in June, Clark could begin some streamlining shortly after. The question is whether this exercise will be about moving furniture or moving minds.
The challenge is to renew the department, to make it the seat of an activist, progressive foreign policy. Finding savings is one thing: finding a future is another. Time will tell how far the mandarins are prepared to go.
Andrew Cohen The Financial Post, May 9, 1990
External’s Woes
Mulroney is the main problem — Canadian diplomats may be overworked and weighed down by bureaucratic detail as the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers alleges in a report. But the real cause of the malaise in the Department of External Affairs is the indifference of the Mulroney Government to Canadian Foreign Policy. Consider the evidence. Under the Mulroney Government, there have been major spending cuts to all the principal vehicles of Canadian Foreign Policy. The defence budget has been slashed. Cuts to the foreign aid budget mean it will remain at about 0.43 per cent of GNP this year and will not reach the government’s stated goal of 0.6 per cent of GNP till 1995. And plans to cut 70 million dollars from Clark’s departmental budget mean that the country with the seventh largest economy in the world must hesitate before opening a new embassy because of economic considerations. At a time when the world is being reshaped on a scale comparable with the events immediately after 1945, the Mulroney government has undertaken to reassess only Canada’s changing relationship with Europe. What we need is a complete rethinking of where Canada can fit into the new international economic and strategic order. The Department of External Affairs – which prides itself on attracting Canada’s best and brightest — is capable of generating concrete ideas about future Foreign Policy toward hemispheric affairs, Europe and Asia. What’s required is a government that takes such ideas seriously.
Editorial The Ottawa Citizen April 14, 1990
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1990), p. 16. Read the rest of this issue →
